Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript

eev.ee

I work on a specialized React interface that's effectively a full-on IDE in the browser. It has an "outer" interface with navigation and search and history functionality, in addition to around a dozen full-fledged "tools" that you can switch between. We've replaced nearly every core HTML tag with a custom component, so that we have full control and can add capabilities exactly where we need to. It doesn't have to be served to anyone outside our office; it's loaded from a file server down the hall and run on powerful workstations. We have effectively no constraints WRT complexity and size. We go to no extra effort to compress our builds outside of sending it through a standard minifier.

The entire JS bundle clocks in at 4.9MB.

For the record: I wholly agree with the author, I'm just balking at Twitter's 40MB.

The app we build is the appiest of web apps, but whenever I'm working on something else I love seeing how far I can get with nothing but static HTML and some clever CSS. The purpose of SPAs was supposed to be that they were more responsive - only load the data instead of a new page! - but these days it's often faster to load a whole new page if that page is lightweight than to change views with JS. That's insanely backwards.

40MB was memory size, not bundle size.

Hmm... it's worded confusingly; at the bottom it says "Maybe scale it down a bit once you hit 40MB of loaded script per page."

There is one problem with the author's request: Putting in the extra work sucks, and management doesn't care, so why bother?

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